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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007 African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Sex exposure/biopower/empowerment: exploring feminist politics and strategies on HIV/AIDS
Panel |
31. Sexuality and Politics in Africa
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Paper ID | 748 |
Author(s) |
Oinas, Elina ; Jungar, Katarina
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Paper |
No paper submitted
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Abstract | In this paper we will explore the challenges feminist scholarship on gender and sexualities is faced with due to the HIV epidemic in Africa. HIV can be viewed as both a discursive construction and a deadly virus, a double existence that creates dilemmas for the study on gender and sexualities. In order not to trivialize the urgency of the epidemic it is important to address these tensions and take them seriously. In this paper 'politics' is understood as feminist politics of writing and knowing as well as politics of sexual lives including structural politics of states, economies and global social injustice.
First, HIV has legitimised the scholarly interest in detailed documentation of sexual lives in a way that goes beyond any past colonial imagination of governmentality. Second, the urgency to implement prevention measures that could curb the spread of the epidemic has placed sexuality firmly in the public domain to such an extent that the private element of intimacy is seriously questioned in African contexts. Prevention efforts expose sexuality and explicitly invest in breaking silences; but what does this mean in terms of policing and surveillance of every day lives and emotions? Third, the need to address asymmetries of gendered power poses a challenge to feminism: how are women depicted in our accounts of powerlessness? What are the images of masculinity and African men that feminist politics of HIV prevention operate with? How to deal with the imagery of the hypersexual aggressive masculinities? What are the understandings of gender and power that emerge on the battlefield of war metaphors in the fight against AIDS?
And yet, concrete feminist strategies are needed; critical approaches merely deconstructing activities of others do not suffice. What lessons can feminist scholars learn from activist approaches? The paper suggests that a turn away from individualizing perspectives towards a contextualizing and political definition of sexuality and the body is already a move towards feminist practices that make a difference in HIV policies and the public interrogation of African sexualities. The empirical basis of the paper is an ethnographical study on young women's HIV activism in South Africa and a literature study on gender sensitive writings on HIV. |
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